Maggie Sajak Spins Wheel for Country

Maggie Sajak
is a pre-med student at Princeton University, and her dad is the world-famous Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak. So it makes perfect sense she’d like to go for a career in country music. Right?

For now, it does make a lot of sense. Because what 18-year-old in her right mind wants to put all their eggs in one basket? So Sajak is going after a few different dreams simultaneously.

“Neither one — medicine or country music — is my fall-back plan,” Sajak told me when she called me from her Princeton dorm room. “I just love them both, so I will keep doing both and see where that takes me. I probably won’t go straight to medical school. I want to be able to focus on my music for a while.”

Sajak’s double life involves a combination of normal Ivy League college experiences, a very difficult biology class and playing music when she can. They’re all dreams that she had growing up.

“I’ve always wanted to be a singer,” she said. “But I also always dreamed of being a doctor, and Princeton was my dream school. So I thought I’d lay the ground work for med school while I’m in college.”

It sounds like her famous father set a good example for show biz, too.

“I loved being around the set with him,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot watching him. And even though music is different than a game show, there are a lot of similarities.”

And, God love Pat Sajak for being a country fan. (In the ’70s, he worked as a disc jockey at a country radio station in Nashville before launching his TV career at a local station.)

“Since I was little, my parents listened to a lot of country,” she said. “My dad lived in Nashville for a while, and he appreciates older country. And my mom loves Faith Hill and Martina McBride. I appreciate the older music, and new artists like Luke Bryan and Carrie Underwood. But I really love the folk singer-songwriters as well. All of that has shaped the kind of music I’m making now.”

You can hear Sajak’s current country single “Wild Boy” and a few others (“If I Was Gonna Go,” “Pretty on the Inside” and “First Kiss”) on her website or on iTunes.